Growing up in inner-city Richmond, Va., Everette Taylor was surrounded by gang violence, prostitution and drug dealing, and little exposure to traditional markers of success. Wealth, to him, was an abstract idea, something he understood primarily as a way out. But he struggled to see himself reflected in the archetypes of success of his generation.

“I was a young Black kid from the inner city, and I didn’t feel like I had anything in common with a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg,” Taylor told Observer in an interview in April.

But the urgency to change his circumstances took root early. He began working at 14, after his mother, a custodian, found drugs in his bedroom and forced him to get a job. During high school, he experienced homelessness, an experience that would deeply shape his worldview and entrepreneurial drive.

“It really showed me what it was like to have nothing, but it also added so much empathy in my life to also be around others that didn’t have anything,” he said. “It’s why I’m so passionate about creating opportunities. A lot of people who are homeless or living in poverty simply don’t have that chance.”

Eventually, he found inspiration in Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, whose dual identity as both artist and entrepreneur resonated more closely.

“I remember seeing him on the cover of Black Enterprise, and I saw someone who was a creative and also shrewd businessman,” Taylor said. “To see him create music that I love and build himself into a billionaire was super inspiring.”

Taylor’s own path would follow that hybrid model. He dropped out of college during his sophomore year to launch his first company, EZ Event, a ticketing platform that grew out of a party promotion business he co-founded with two college friends. After selling the company a few years later, he briefly returned to school—only to leave again, this time for Silicon Valley.

By his mid-20s, Taylor had built a reputation as an executive who knows how to grow a fledgling business rapidly. At 25, he became head of marketing at Sticker Mule, followed by a stint as chief marketing officer at Qualaroo. He went on to co-found several startups, including PopSocial, which he sold at 28, marking his most successful exit.

In 2019, he launched ArtX, a platform designed to support emerging artists, and relocated to New York. That same year, he joined online art marketplace Artsy as chief marketing officer, his first role at an established company.

“I had these small wins with startups, but Artsy was the first really established company that gave me an opportunity to be a part of the C-suite at only 29 years old,” he said. “That was a huge game changer, because it gave me the credibility to build at scale and a true global international business.”

At Artsy, Taylor helped grow its revenue by 150 percent in one year. In April 2022, he was named one of Forbes’ top 50 most entrepreneurial CMOs. A subsequent Financial Times profile further elevated his visibility—and caught the attention of Kickstarter.

When Taylor was approached to lead the crowdfunding platform in 2022, the business was struggling. Revenue had been declining by roughly 20 percent annually, and Kickstarter was steadily losing ground to competitor Indiegogo.

Taylor’s strategy centered on refocusing Kickstarter around its core strength: community-driven discovery. Unlike traditional fundraising platforms, Kickstarter does not rely on equity financing. Instead, it allows creators to raise money directly from supporters. The platform makes money from a 5 percent commission on funds raised and payment processing fees.

Taylor leaned into what he describes as “matching niche projects with niche backers” by prioritizing quality, curation and creator storytelling over scale-at-all-costs growth. The overlap between creators and backers (many users participate as both) became a key advantage in rebuilding network effects. He also doubled down on Kickstarter’s identity as a creative ecosystem rather than a transactional marketplace, investing in tools and programming that help creators build audiences, not just raise funds.

Since Taylor took over, Kickstarter has regained dominance in its category, capturing an estimated 98 percent of Indiegogo’s market share, according to Taylor. In 2025, the company reported revenue growth of 50 percent year-over-year.

For Taylor, the mission is also deeply personal. Having built his own companies without venture capital, he remains acutely aware of the structural barriers facing underrepresented founders.

“I never tried to [raise venture capital]. I knew what it was like out there for me as a Black founder,” he said. “So I focused on building companies that I could get to profitability pretty fast. I didn’t go after the biggest ideas because I didn’t feel like I would get funded.”

“I started my first company almost 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like things are much better than it was even back then,” he added. Black founders received only about 0.4 percent of U.S. venture capital in 2024, sharply down from its 1.3 percent peak in 2021.

Taylor sees Kickstarter as an alternative funding pathway less constrained by traditional gatekeepers. “We want to make sure that you know founders have the opportunity to be successful on our platform, no matter what their background,” he said.

That commitment also extends internally. Today, all six members of Kickstarter’s executive team are people of color, and half are women.

This year’s Allen & Company Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, is expected to begin July 7, according to a meeting minute from the local Friedman Memorial Airport, which handles the stream of private jets that descend on the resort town each summer. As always, Variety has obtained the guest list. This year’s roster pairs familiar power players in tech and media with a handful of notable newcomers.

Among the expected attendees are Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman. The media contingent includes David Ellison, Bob Iger, David Zaslav, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, and the Murdochs.

A few names stand out as newer to the Sun Valley conversation, including Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro, Apple’s incoming chief John Ternus and CBS News’ controversial Bari Weiss. Noticeably absent this year are Elon Musk, who just became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO; Nvidia’s high-flying CEO Jensen Huang; David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison; and Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO, Greg Abel.

Here’s a look at the major players expected at this year’s gathering:

Tech and A.I.

• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
• John Ternus, Incoming CEO of Apple
• Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon
• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
• Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet/Google
• Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
• Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI
• Mackenzie Price, Co-founder of Alpha School

Media

• David Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance
• Bari Weiss, Editor-in-Chief of CBS News
• Bob Iger, Former CEO of Disney
• Josh D’Amaro, CEO of Disney
• Dana Walden, Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment
• Alan Bergman, Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment
• Jimmy Pitaro, Chairman of ESPN
• Brian Grazer, Co-founder of Imagine Entertainment
• Brian Roberts, Chairman of Comcast
• Mike Cavanagh, Co-CEO of Comcast
• David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery
• Ted Sarandos, Co-CEO of Netflix
• Greg Peters, Co-CEO of Netflix
• Ravi Ahuja, Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment
• Rupert Murdoch, Chairman Emeritus of Fox Corp.
• Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of Fox Corp.
• Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube
• Eddy Cue, SVP, Services of Apple
• Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC/Expedia Group

Philanthropy, retail and investing

• François-Henri Pinault, Chairman and CEO of Kering
• Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel
• Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Wendi Murdoch, Producer/Entrepreneur
• Jeffrey Katzenberg, Co-founder and Partner of WndrCo
• Jared Kushner, Founder of Affinity Partners
• Josh Kushner, Founder of Thrive Capital

Arts and sports

• Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the NFL
• Rob Manfred, Commissioner of the MLB
• Casey Wasserman, Chairman of the LA28 Olympic Organizing Committee
• Bryan Lourd, CEO of Creative Artists Agency (CAA)
• Michael Rapino, CEO of Live Nation

Journalists and academics

• Gayle King, Anchor of CBS News
• Anderson Cooper, Anchor of CNN
• Van Jones, Contributor of CNN
• Bret Baier, Anchor of Fox News
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist of The New York Times
• Evan Osnos, Staff Writer of The New Yorker
• Thomas Friedman, Columnist of The New York Times
• David Ignatius, Columnist of The Washington Post
• Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist/Author at NYU Stern
• Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University
• Willow Bay, Dean of USC Annenberg School

In recent weeks, a slate of today’s most prominent tech figures—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others—took the podium at university commencements to address an anxious Class of 2026, the first cohort to spend their entire college years alongside generative A.I. tools. (ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, during their freshman year.) Across campuses, the industry leaders behind those podiums delivered a broadly similar message: embrace A.I., but learn to master it. How that message landed, however, depended less on what was said than on who said it—and, perhaps, where it was said.

The starkest contrast played out between Schmidt at the University of Arizona and Huang at Carnegie Mellon. While Schmidt’s buoyant optimism about A.I. drew loud jeers and boos throughout his speech, Huang’s similarly upbeat message was met with quiet reverence.

Further south, at Middle Tennessee State University, Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group (which famously launched Taylor Swift), also faced pushback when he told graduates to “deal with it” while discussing A.I.’s disruption of the creative industries.

Meanwhile, at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak earned sustained applause with a line that wittily flipped the narrative: “You all have A.I.—actual intelligence.”

Those polarized reactions were not the result of any single speech. If you listen closely to what they said, the text of those prepared remarks was highly similar. What differed was the tone of the delivery and the audience hearing it. If there was a pattern, students at elite institutions appeared more receptive to pro–A.I. messaging than their peers at public universities. Huang spoke at a school widely considered one of the birthplaces of A.I. (where researchers created the first A.I. computer program in the 1950s.) Last week, his rival (and distant relative), AMD’s Lisa Su, gave a commencement speech at her alma mater, MIT, where she was also warmly celebrated.

Of course, just as important was the person behind the podium. Commencement speeches, especially at alma maters, are among the rare moments when tech CEOs drop their corporate armor and offer something resembling personal advice. But they’re also an unforgiving referendum on reputation. Huang and Su, who are actively building the infrastructure powering the A.I. boom, are seen as shaping the future in tangible ways while taking real business risks. Schmidt, by contrast, has long been seen as an out-of-touch capitalist and the poster child for an older, unfeeling era of Big Tech. His awkwardly rushed, occasionally tone-deaf delivery in Arizona only amplified that perception.

The rapid evolution of A.I. tools over the past three to four years has reshaped how students choose majors and think about careers. While overall unemployment in the U.S. remains relatively low, entry-level hiring has severely contracted. (Blame remote work, too, because employers are reluctant to hire fresh graduates on remote teams due to training challenges.) According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 22 to 27 climbed to 5.7 percent, reaching its highest level since 2014, excluding the pandemic years.

Against that backdrop, the advice from tech leaders converges on a simple theme: expect disruption, and adapt.

“My career started at the beginning of the PC revolution. Your career starts at the beginning of the A.I. revolution. I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life’s work,” Huang said. “A.I. is not likely to replace you, but someone using A.I. better than you might.”

“Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. The best people do,” Su echoed. “It needs people who know what to use it for—people with purpose, judgment, and courage; people who look at a hard problem and say: this matters, and we can figure it out.”

And, stripped of the snark that greeted it in Arizona, Schmidt’s core message was not so different: A.I. “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship.” But, he added, it only becomes useful if people do the work to understand it. “I think the key thing is we need, as humans, to retain the sort of sense that hard work, going through the difficulty of learning things, is worthwhile and it pays off, and that’s how you really improve yourself,” he said.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to go public next month. While the hype around it has lifted other space-related stocks, this listing represents far more than a rocket company debuting on the public market. Ahead of its IPO filing, SpaceX acquired Musk’s A.I. startup, xAI, which itself had already absorbed X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In recent years, SpaceX has also expanded beyond rocket manufacturing into telecommunications through its Starlink division. The company coming to Nasdaq is one that wraps rocket and satellite production, internet services, A.I. research, data centers and social media all under a single conglomerate valued at $1.75 trillion.

This new incarnation of SpaceX is the latest manifestation of Musk’s lifelong ambition to build an all-encompassing business empire under the “X” brand.

That vision dates back to 1999, when Musk used his first fortune from Zip2 to launch an online bank called X.com, a precursor to PayPal. X.com was meant to radically reshape the global financial system by handling banking, brokerage and insurance all in one place.

The company later merged with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s Confinity to form what would become PayPal. The merger sparked a fierce internal debate over branding. Musk pushed to retain X.com, arguing that “PayPal” sounded too narrow and limiting, according to Jimmy Soni’s 2022 book, The Founders: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Story of PayPal. Thiel and Levchin favored “PayPal” for its clearer connection to the company’s core service, and focus groups found “X.com” vague or even suggestive of adult content. After Musk was ousted as CEO, the new leadership quickly rebranded the company as PayPal.

In 2017, Musk paid an undisclosed but substantial sum to reacquire the X.com domain. At the time, he described it as having “great sentimental value,” despite having no immediate plans for its use.

According to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of the entrepreneur, Musk had already outlined a detailed business plan in 1999: to create a platform that would combine social media, news, e-commerce and personal finance into a single, seamless ecosystem—similar to China’s WeChat.

That vision began to take shape in late 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He described the purchase as a way to accelerate the creation of “X” by several years. Soon after, he renamed the parent company X Corp. and rebranded the platform itself as X.

Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter “X”

Musk is known for his many quirky obsessions, including his fondness for the numbers 420 and 69. His fixation on the letter “X” is woven throughout his business empire. SpaceX itself is a stylized shorthand for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.”That’s a mouthful. We’ll just call it SpaceX…I like the idea of capitalizing the X just artistically,” Musk said on Nikhil Kamath’s “WTF is?” podcast in 2025.

He has traced that preference back to the late 1990s, when he was searching for a name for his online financial venture. “There were only three one-letter domain names: X, Q and Z. I was like, okay, I want to create this place where it’s the financial crossroads—or like the financial exchange,” he said on the same podcast.

The motif extends to his other businesses and even his personal life. Musk named Tesla’s luxury SUV the Model X and incorporated the letter into one of his sons’ names, X Æ A-Xii, who is commonly referred to as “X” or “Lil X.”

SpaceX has finally opened the books. In a long-awaited IPO filing released Wednesday (May 20), Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company disclosed new details about its finances, spending and the insiders poised to reap enormous gains if the listing meets expectations.

The filing leaves out key pricing details for now, but investors are anchoring to a roughly $2 trillion valuation. At that level, Musk would become the world’s first trillionaire, while a tight circle of longstanding executives and early investors stand to become multibillionaires.

Here’s a closer look:

COO Gwynne Shotwell

Few individuals are better positioned to benefit than Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer. Hired in 2002 as employee No. 11, Shotwell was initially tasked with building out sales for the Falcon 1 rocket. She rose to president and COO in 2008 after securing a major NASA contract and now oversees nearly all non-engineering functions, including operations, legal, finance and sales.

Shotwell owns 12.6 million SpaceX shares. With a $2 trillion valuation, her stake alone would be worth nearly $3 billions. She earned $85.8 million in total compensation last year, including stock options.

Her background includes engineering roles at Aerospace Corp. and Microcosm. She holds degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Northwestern University.

CFO Bret Johnsen

Bret Johnsen plays a central role in preparing SpaceX for the public markets. He joined the company in 2011 after senior finance roles at Broadcom and Mindspeed Technologies, bringing experience in managing capital-intensive operations.

Johnsen has been the primary bridge between SpaceX—one of the world’s most valuable private companies—and its small circle of powerful shareholders. His responsibilities have become increasingly critical as spending has surged into the tens of billions.

Johnsen owns about 9.6 million SpaceX shares. At a $2 trillion valuation, his stake will be worth $1.4 billion. His total compensation last year was $9.8 million, according to Wednesday’s filing.

Early investors set for windfalls

Several longtime Musk allies and early backers sit on SpaceX’s board, and stand to gain significantly from the listing:

• Luke Nosek: PayPal co-founder and Gigafund founder; board member since 2008; stake valued at around $5 billion.
• Antonio Gracias: Founder of Valor Equity Partners; board member since 2010; controls 503 million shares across funds, making Valor one of SpaceX’s largest institutional holders.
• Steve Jurvetson: Future Ventures co-founder and longtime Musk ally; joined the board in 2009.
• Donald Harrison: Google executive; represents an early institutional investor in SpaceX.
• Ira Ehrenpreis: Venture capitalist and Tesla board member; joined in 2026 and expected to chair the compensation and nominating committee.
• Randy Glein: DFJ Growth co-founder; longtime board observer turned director in 2026; set to chair the audit committee.

SpaceX’s financial reality and the bigger picture

Despite its scale and ambition, SpaceX is not profitable and is spending money faster than making it. The company lost $4.9 billion last year. In the first three months of this year alone, it lost $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion of revenue.

Its annual revenue has been growing at about a 33 percent pace, but its capital expenditure is doubling every year. Last year, SpaceX spent $20.7 billion. About 60 percent was spent on A.I. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX already spent $10.1 billion, $7.7 billion of which was on A.I.

SpaceX’s debut is not just about rockets. Through its integration with xAI, the company is positioning itself at the center of the A.I. infrastructure race. It is also expected to open the floodgates for other major A.I. listings, including potential IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic.

For now, the biggest question is whether public market investors will embrace SpaceX’s aggressive spending and long-term vision—or balk at the scale of its losses.

SpaceX will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in June.

On Tuesday (May 19), as Sundar Pichai unveiled a slew of A.I. updates at Google’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., the company’s president and chief investment officer, Ruth Porat, took the stage in a scorching New York City to explain the massive financial stakes behind the tech giant’s ambitious A.I. push.

Google’s capital expenditure (CapEx) has nearly doubled from last year, skyrocketing to an estimated $180 billion to $190 billion in 2026. The company has committed to spending roughly 40 percent of that staggering budget on data center buildouts, with the remaining 60 percent allocated to other A.I. infrastructure like chips. Speaking at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit during an onstage interview with editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan, Porat explained that this sky-high spending is a response to an industry-wide “platform shift” that Google simply cannot afford to miss.

“We haven’t seen anything this profound in our lifetime. You don’t want to be behind the curve,” she said. “It is an incredible privilege to be living today, especially when you’re focused on what you can do with technology to advance science, drive economic growth, improve the delivery of critical social services and make advances in health care, education, cybersecurity and security. That upside potential is profound. And to deliver it, we clearly need the compute capacity.”

To secure that capacity, Google has been aggressively amassing A.I. chips. While continuing to stock up on Nvidia GPUs, it is mass-producing its in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to run its Gemini models.

While the current A.I. boom took off publicly with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Google has long been a leader in A.I. research. Exactly a decade ago, CEO Pichai famously declared that Google was “moving from mobile-first to A.I.-first,” meaning “we are going to invest aggressively to lead in A.I., and we’re going to have a full stack approach,” Porat explained on Tuesday, noting that the vision continues to govern senior leadership decisions. “It’s models, it’s chips, it’s research, and it’s the application across all of our platforms,” she added.

The A.I. tools widely available today are far from perfect. Large language models are still notoriously prone to “hallucinations.” Eradicating these errors requires more compute power and deeper training capabilities.

“One area we care immensely about is delivering for everyone in a high-quality way, especially when models were hallucinating,” Porat said. “If you wake up in the middle of the night and your child has a fever, and you want to give Tylenol, it better be right. Google stands for quality, and that was very important to us.”

Porat’s leadership lessons from Wall Street

Porat stepped into her role as Google’s president and chief investment officer in September 2023, after serving as CFO for eight years—the longest tenure in the company’s history. Before Google, Porat was the financial chief at Morgan Stanley.

During the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, Porat worked closely with then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, from whom she said she learned her most valuable leadership lessons.

At the time, she was running a business covering banks, insurance companies and asset managers as the global economy was fracturing. When Paulson needed an elite advisory team to analyze the unfolding collapse, he tapped Porat to lead a group of about 40 financial experts.

“When I later got to Google, I was asked, ‘What were the lessons from the financial crisis?’ It struck me as a totally bizarre question coming from a place where things had only been going up,” she recalled. 

Her takeaway from working with Paulson boiled down to three core leadership principles, which she now applies to the fast-moving A.I. landscape.

First, “identify your greatest source of vulnerability and protect against it early, because you cannot protect against it in that moment when you need it most,” she said. During the financial crisis, that vulnerability was bank liquidity. In the A.I. era, the vulnerability is stagnation. “If a competitor is using [a revenue opportunity] and you’re not, the steep curve makes it hard to catch up later.”

Second, Porat stresses that leaders must have both the will and the financial means to act. “Too often, by the time you mobilize your team and have the will, you no longer have the financial means to catch up,” she said.

Finally, she highlights the importance of building a team that provides “horizontal vision”—the ability to look across multiple organizational units and spot patterns and trends. “Technology can help, but in a rapidly changing world, a broad vision is essential,” she explained. “As I often say, give me horizontal vision. I can then connect the dots to the future…These lessons remain central to leadership today.”

Esther Wojcicki lives less than 10 minutes away from both of her daughters and her many grandchildren in Palo Alto, Calif. On Mother’s Day, that proximity turns into, in her own words, “chaos.” “Kids are running around with presents. Nobody is organized. They’re all really excited. They want to know where the cake is,” she told Observer ahead of the holiday. “I celebrate my daughters as mothers, of course, and they celebrate me as mother. All the kids celebrate me as the grandmother, otherwise known as Nana.”

Esther, 85, is the subject of a new documentary this year called “The Godmother of Silicon Valley.” A former public high school teacher for more than 40 years, she has many famous students, including former NBA player Jeremy Lin, actor James Franco and writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs. At home, she has also raised three equally accomplished women: former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, and anthropologist and epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki.

In 2019, Esther published a best-selling book called How to Raise Successful People, in which she outlines her education philosophy known as “TRICK,” which stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness.

The book wasn’t exactly an instant hit within her own family. “When it first came out [in 2019], [Anne] was laughing like, ‘Mom, I can’t believe you wrote this!'” she said. But now, Anne practices that model with her own three children.

“We tease her about TRICK all the time. But yes, I follow her method now,” Anne told Observer in a separate interview recently. “My mom is so much fun. She’s wild. She’s like my teenager.”

Esther has 10 grandchildren, ages six to 26. She stays in touch with all of them via WhatsApp. Most nights, she’s at one of their dinner tables. “I take turns,” she said.

Her former students occupy much of the rest of her social calendar. “I’ve got, you know, coffee and tea and lunch and dinner. And I was like, ‘God, I’m getting fat!'” Esther said. “But I’m really happy to see them all. My main goal is to support them in whatever they’re doing.”

Esther taught English and Journalism at Palo Alto High School. She is best known for founding the Media Arts Program at the school and expanding it from a single journalism class into a massive program that allows students to specialize in various media fields.

While some of her students went on to become very successful journalists, such as The Economist editors Gady Epstein and Noah Sneider, Esther—the daughter of a struggling artist—made an intentional effort to nudge her creatively minded students, including her eldest daughter, Susan, onto practical career paths.

“Susan was incredibly talented as an artist,” she said of the former YouTube CEO who passed away in 2024. “And I was worried, because I wanted to make sure that she had alternative skills besides just art, and she did.”

“I’ve had hundreds of kids who were great artists, and I geared every single one of them toward graphic art and computer design and anything connected with computers and technology,” she added. “I wasn’t against the field. I just don’t want any of my students to starve.”

Esther retired from Palo Alto High School in 2020. She continues to write, speak and travel to discuss her TRICK method. “The TRICK model could work to help you get along with your child for life, and also help you get along with your spouse. It works in all human interactions,” she said.

Last Friday, Ermenegildo Zegna Group, the parent company of Zegna and Thom Browne, and operator of Tom Ford’s fashion business, reported first-quarter earnings results. It was the first fiscal quarter without Ermenegildo “Gildo” Zegna, the third-generation leader of the family business, in the CEO seat. Revenue grew steadily overall, but the Middle East saw a double-digit decline amid the ongoing conflict in Iran. The company’s new CEO, Gianluca Tagliabue, was candid with analysts: April continued the negative trend, and “we are still with a big question mark” about how the region will develop in the coming months.

Tagliabue, who spent a decade as Zegna’s CFO and COO, was appointed to fill the large shoes left by Mr. Zegna, who led the company as CEO for more than 20 years and now serves as executive chairman. As part of that transition, he also named his sons, Edoardo and Angelo Zegna, co-CEOs of the Zegna brand.

A few days before the earnings report, Mr. Zegna was asked about the Middle East at a business event in Washington D.C. He reiterated his patience and long-term vision, saying he believed the region “will come back,” while emphasizing the company’s continued strength in the U.S. and untapped markets such as Japan and Korea. “Be true to your values, and stay the course,” he summed up his leadership principle to an audience.

Mr. Zegna, who turned 70 last September, shares the name of his grandfather, who founded the family business in 1910 as a wool mill in northern Italy. He takes particular pride in the company’s deep historic roots and vertically integrated supply chain, meaning it owns every step of production, from raw textile to finished garments to retail.

Yet, quarterly scrutiny from U.S. public markets is a relatively new experience for a century-old Italian family business. While luxury conglomerates like LVMH and Kering are publicly traded in Europe, Zegna is the only major European luxury group listed in the U.S. With a market cap of $3.25 billion, Mr. Zegna humbly calls his company “a grain in the sand” among those on the New York Stock Exchange, while also viewing the listing as putting the family business “in the championship league,” he told Observer.

Mr. Zegna said the idea of going public had surfaced often among family members. Most of the time, the answer was no. That changed during COVID, when luxury spending surged alongside a wave of SPAC IPOs. Zegna received an investment offer from Andrea Bonomi, a major dealmaker in Italian and European private equity, and went public in December 2021 through a SPAC created by Bonomi, Investindustrial Acquisition Corp, chaired by UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti. The Zegna family retained a controlling stake of nearly 66 percent in the merged company to ensure it continues to make major decisions.

“Looking back, [going public] has improved stability and given us a different sense of scale,” Mr. Zegna said. “It was a move to grow up—more disciplined, more scale, more independent—while putting the family in a position to move forward with the new generations. It came naturally for the time we were in.”

He stressed that Zegna isn’t run by the quarter. “The important thing is to make correct promises. Don’t overpromise. And once you promise something, stick to that. These rules are not that different than when we were a private company,” he said.

Consumer sentiment in the luxury sector has taken a sharp turn in recent years. LVMH, the industry’s bellwether, reported a 6 percent decline in revenue for the first quarter. Zegna is partially insulated from the slowdown thanks to the rise of the quiet luxury trend. “We are one of the few brands that are true examples of quiet luxury. Quiet luxury is very much related to Italy,” Zegna said, noting that even many French ready-to-wear luxury brands are produced in Italy.

That doesn’t mean the company can just sit back and benefit from the fashion cycle. Mr. Zegna, wearing a casual Zegna ready-to-wear jacket and sneakers during the interview, spoke frequently about younger consumers (around age 30). He said Zegna’s average customer in the U.S. is now about 10 years younger than before COVID, and that younger customers continue to support the business in China, a market roughly the same size as the U.S. for the company.

These shifts reflect the company’s effort to modernize its product lines, introducing more casual, contemporary designs such as drawstring pants, shoulderless jackets and sneakers. Shoes are now its most popular category, Mr. Zegna said.

In many ways, the brand’s appeal lies in that balance between heritage and evolution. Mr. Zegna often says that “Zegna is costly, but it’s not expensive,” because a piece can last for decades. “You come and visit our factory and our mill in the mountains, and you understand why we’re costly.”

He said he still owns Zegna coats that belonged to his grandfather, and they remain “as modern and fresh as ever.”

There’s a lot of confusion around 23andMe: Is the company still in business? Is it now owned by Regeneron, the biotech company that once tried to buy it? Are its genetic test kits still available for sale? And if you’re a customer, what happens to your data? It’s been about a year since 23andMe plummeted into Chapter 11 following a series of financial and regulatory misfortunes. Last summer, in bankruptcy court, the company’s founder and former CEO, Anne Wojcicki, won a bidding war against Regeneron and took over 23andMe’s assets, most importantly the genetic data of millions of users, for $305 million. The company now operates as the 23andMe Research Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization.

Its nonprofit status means 23andMe is now more focused on making a positive impact than selling test kits. “We have, in many ways, the same mission and the same business, but it’s 100 percent aligned now with having a scientific impact,” Wojcicki told Observer at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington D.C. last week. “Everything that we do now is through that angle of the impact of the foundation.”

23andMe Research Institute is a nonprofit medical research organization, which means it isn’t bound by the 5 percent annual payout rule required of private charities like the Gates Foundation. Instead, it must continuously engage in medical research. The structure also adds a layer of protection for user data. If 23andMe Research Institute were to shut down, it couldn’t simply sell the data to, say, a hedge fund; the assets would have to be transferred to another nonprofit with a similar mission. During congressional testimony last year, Wojcicki also pledged never to sell data to China or any entity owned by a foreign adversary.

At its peak, 23andMe was valued at $6 billion when it went public in 2021. By the time it filed for bankruptcy, its market cap had fallen to around $20 million. A major turning point came in late 2023, when the company suffered a data breach that ultimately affected nearly seven million users, including relatives of more than 10,000 users whose accounts were directly compromised. The incident sparked a “delete 23andMe” campaign, prompting about two million users (out of 15 million) to leave the platform before the restructuring.

“Part of the reason why we became a nonprofit was to protect the data in perpetuity,” Wojcicki said. “Going forward as a nonprofit, it gives it a new level of stability.”

Despite the user losses, she maintains that customers retained control over their data. “As painful as the last couple of years have been, what I’m proud of is that we honored our word by making sure customers always had a choice,” she said.

23andMe Research Institute is funded by both 23andMe’s revenue and outside capital, and Wojcicki said it’s on track to cover research spending through revenue alone. The organization is governed by a board with close ties to Wojcicki and the biotech world, including Stephen Quake, head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; her sister Janet Wojcicki, an epidemiology professor at UCSF; her family office CEO Stephen Magowan; and seasoned biotech executive Brad Margus.

A focus on research

Earlier this month, 23andMe Research Institute published a major study in the science journal Nature on genetic predictors for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The study offers the first direct genetic evidence explaining why people respond differently to medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Analyzing data from more than 27,000 participants, researchers identified genetic markers linked to both weight-loss success and the risk of severe side effects.

This kind of scientific contribution is now the company’s core focus. Medical research is notoriously expensive and slow. 23andMe is trying to disrupt that model by building what Wojcicki describes as “a massive, ongoing, never-ending research cohort where you can ask all kinds of questions.” Even when recruiting narrowly defined groups—for example, only people with Parkinson’s—the company asks them a wide range of questions, from serious conditions like cancer to traits as specific as sneezing in response to sunlight. “We ask all kinds of questions, and because we have all this data—and 13 million people participating—you can do research almost like it’s a Google query,” she said during an onstage interview last week. More than 11 million of 23andMe users have consented to participate in research, a company spokesperson clarified.

Wojcicki’s sister, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, died in August 2024 at age 56 after a two-year battle with non-small-cell lung cancer. “She was really clear that you should do whatever you can with my data that advances lung cancer,” Wojcicki said. “So we want to reflect whatever is in the interest of our customer.” She emphasized that 23andMe does not sell user data and only shares scientific insights with partners.

“I have two primary goals,” Wojcicki said. “One, that every person in the world can benefit from genetic testing. Everyone should know their genetic information. And two, to build the world’s largest open-source research platform so we can answer important questions faster and with far less capital.”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that 23andMe was owned by TTAM. TTAM was an entity created during 23andMe’s bankruptcy process for the purpose of bidding on the company’s assets.

After years of speculation and quiet succession planning, Apple announced yesterday (April 20) that Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September and be replaced by John Ternus, Apple’s current head of hardware engineering. Cook will transition into the role of executive chairman and welcome Ternus to the board. Needless to say, this is perhaps the most consequential leadership change in the tech world in years. A new leader at the helm of Apple will, in many ways, shape the future look and feel of devices used by billions of people worldwide.

Ternus is 51—about the same age Cook was when he took over as CEO in 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs. He has spent 25 years at Apple, rising entirely through the hardware ranks. In the CEO role, he has big shoes to fill and a lot to prove. Not only will he face pressure to carry forward the formidable legacy left behind by Cook, who grew Apple’s market cap more than 20 times during his 15-year tenure, but he will also manage an executive team of similarly seasoned leaders, many of whom are older than him and were, until recently, contenders for the top job.

“My biggest question is how he will be able to retain the people he has worked with in the past as peers,” Om Malik, a venture capitalist and an influential tech writer, told Observer. In particular, Malik pointed to Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software. “He didn’t get the job. So will he stay? Or will he go?” he asked. “The same goes for others in the leadership team and how he handles that transition. It would be pretty interesting to see.”

Other senior executives under Ternus include services chief Eddy Cue, chief operating officer Sabih Khan, retail chief Deirdre O’Brien, and newly joined Amar Subramanya, Apple’s VP of A.I. While Subramanya reports directly to Federighi, observers will be watching closely to see how Ternus steers Apple’s A.I. strategy, an area where the company is widely seen as lagging behind its peers.

How John Ternus got the job

During succession planning, Apple’s approach seemed to be finding someone similar to Cook in both experience and temperament. For years, Jeff Williams, Apple’s former chief operating officer who was described as “the closest thing to Tim Cook,” was a top contender. However, one factor against him was age. At just three years younger than Cook, he likely didn’t fit Apple’s preference for long-serving CEOs. Williams retired last summer and later joined Disney’s board.

Ternus fits that mold closely and is significantly younger. He is “well-liked” within Apple’s leadership ranks and is known as a meticulous engineer, according to Bloomberg, citing former colleagues.

“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor,” Cook said in a statement yesterday. “He is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”

Still, some former Apple executives have raised concerns about Ternus’s lack of a track record in making hard decisions. Two areas that will be closely watched are Apple’s next wave of product innovation and the evolution of its A.I. strategy. The company hasn’t released a truly groundbreaking product in years, and its A.I. efforts are widely seen as trailing competitors.

Dan Russell, senior partner at the leadership consulting firm RHR, which specializes in succession planning, said the handover signals a return from operational efficiency back to “category-defining hardware disruption.”

“We must move past the idea that a successor should be a carbon copy. Steve Jobs was the ‘zero-to-one’ creator. Tim Cook was the ‘one-to-n’ operational architect,” Russell told Observer, adding that Ternus’ innovative mindset and engineering mindset might be just what Apple needs to navigate an “era of massive disruption” marked by the “A.I. arms race and global supply chain rewiring.”

Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001. In 2013, he was promoted to VP of hardware engineering, overseeing development across the iPad, Mac and AirPods product lines. In 2021, he was promoted again to SVP of hardware engineering. In late 2022, his responsibilities expanded to include Apple Watch hardware.

Prior to Apple, Ternus worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was also a competitive swimmer and earned an all-time letterwinner distinction on the men’s team.

“Elite athletes often exhibit a leadership style defined by a high desire to win, beat the competition, and an appetite for stretch goals. In a market currently questioning Apple’s innovation pace, a leader with that drive and discipline is exactly what the board likely prioritized,” Russell said.

For about a decade leading up to COVID-19, Coach was on a slow decline. Despite its reputation for premium materials and craftsmanship, the brand was increasingly seen as something of an outlet afterthought. But in recent years, the 85-year-old handbag maker has staged a striking comeback. With its colorful “Tabby” a few years ago and the more recent street-chic “Brooklyn,” along with the ambassadorship of youthful Hollywood icons like Selena Gomez and Elle Fanning, Coach is suddenly cool again. All of it suggests that the turnaround under Joanne Crevoiserat, the CEO of Coach’s parent company Tapestry (which also owns Kate Spade), is working.

The secret formula is all about the young consumer. “We have made the strategic choice to focus on the young consumer. The younger generation really sets the tone for all generations, and we’re seeing that in our business,” Crevoiserat said during an onstage interview at Semafor World Economy in Washington D.C. on Monday (April 13). 

“We laugh around our executive committee table, but nobody’s asking me what’s cool or what’s fashionable,” the 62-year-old executive added with a chuckle.

Gen Z shoppers accounted for about a third of Tapestry’s new customers during its latest fiscal quarter ended December, the company said, contributing to strong revenue growth. Tapestry’s total sales rose 14 percent year-over-year to $2.5 billion, more than 85 percent of which came from Coach, whose own sales jumped 25 percent from a year earlier. Crevoiserat said Tapestry is seeing double-digit growth in all of its key markets.

Coach’s strong performance stands in stark contrast to a sector-wide slowdown in the higher end of luxury retail and weakening consumer sentiment among the middle class. “People ask me all the time, ‘Isn’t this young consumer under pressure? How is your business still so healthy?’ The answer is, we stay close to our consumers,” Crevoiserat said. “We really want to understand what they’re going through, how they’re feeling.”

That understanding is rooted in data-driven insights as much as creative intuition on what resonates with the consumer—what Crevoiserat calls a balancing act between “logic and magic.”

“We’re harnessing a lot of data to understand the consumer at a really granular level, but then we go that step deeper, and we go into their homes to really understand where the tensions are in their life. It’s not just about their transactions that we’re after,” she explained.

“Nothing matters more than listening to the consumer. [Coach] is not trying to push designs on them. They design to what [the consumer] wants and needs,” Marie Driscoll, president of the Retail Marketing Society and an adjunct professor at Parsons, The New School, told Observer. She pointed to the 2023 launch of Coachtopia, a sustainability-focused sub-brand, as an example of Coach speaking to a young, environmentally minded customer base. 

Crevoiserat became Tapestry’s CEO in 2020 after serving as the company’s chief financial officer for a brief year. She initially stepped in on an interim basis following the abrupt ouster of Jide Zeitlin but ultimately earned the permanent role for her steady leadership. Before joining Tapestry, she held senior positions at retail giants including Abercrombie & Fitch and Kohl’s.

For many decades, Coach has been the go-to choice for a first luxury handbag or a milestone purchase as an aspirational symbol of success. That appeal faded in the 2010s as its designs stagnated and its branding lost clarity. Under creative director Stuart Vevers, who joined from Loewe and Mulberry, Coach has put on a fresh look in recent years. The company’s strategy now is centered on rekindling that sense of excitement of owning something special for the first time.

“Fashion has always been an emotional purchase. To that young customer, while they know that some of those big life moments may not be reachable in their near future, they want to enjoy the life that they are living, and they’re investing in the things that bring them joy,” Crevoiserat said. “We want to earn the right to be her first luxury bag purchase. It fosters brand love for a lifetime.”

Georgia Fearn contributed to the reporting of this story.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Tapestry owns Stuart Weitzman. Tapestry sold Stuart Weitzman in August 2025. 

On the bustling floor of the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington D.C. this week, a row of glass-doored WeWork pods by the window offers a much-needed refuge for the business executives, journalists and other attendees looking for a quiet space to get some work done. WeWork launched these portable workspaces, called WeWork Go, at the event. It’s the company’s latest effort to meet the shifting needs of white-collar workers in a post-COVID world. The architect behind the project, Ebbie Wisecarver, WeWork’s chief design and product officer, said the pods were inspired by the popularity of phone booths at WeWork’s office locations.

“Work has changed and expanded. We’ve been exploring this idea of introducing [a product] that’s beyond the walls of our spaces,” Wisecarver told Observer near one of those pods. In the return-to-office era, the designer has observed a sharp decline in companies that still want traditional offices and a growing need for flexibility. “They’re more comfortable with having flexible spaces, more soft seating and less desk-heavy spaces,” she said. “Maybe a room is a conference room, but it can also be someone’s office.”

The pod at the Semafor event features a pale-oak desk, a restaurant booth-style seat big enough for one person and a large bag (though not wide enough for an adult to lie down—Wisecarver is ambivalent about the rising trend of workplace napping pods), a coat hook and a few electrical outlets. The design stays true to WeWork’s familiar aesthetic of soft colors, sleek lines and natural light that evoke a sense of home.

These pods are designed for airports, convention centers, office lobbies and other high-traffic public venues. They rent for about $15–$20 per half-hour, depending on the location. WeWork Go comes in three models: a single-user pod for independent work, a multi-user version that fits up to four people, and an ADA-compatible model designed for universal accessibility.

Wisecarver has been with WeWork since 2015, through various tumultuous stages of the company that, at its peak, was valued at $47 billion. Long gone are the days when WeWork was a high-flying Silicon Valley unicorn. After years of founder-driven excess followed by a pandemic collapse, WeWork emerged from bankruptcy in 2024 with a new CEO, real estate veteran John Santora, a more traditional governance structure, and a much more cautious strategy.

“We’re operating in the midst of a structural shift in how companies use real estate. It’s no longer one-size-fits-all. Flexibility now sits alongside traditional leases, and our spaces are designed to support that reality,” Santora told Observer via email. “The design of our spaces—whether it’s a full office or our WeWork Go pods—is a direct reflection of our mission to unlock a smarter way to work.”

Wisecarver’s design team is now smaller than a few years ago—about 180 people in total, including 20 designers—with some functions like customer support and project management outsourced. The WeWork Go pods themselves are manufactured by furniture maker Bureau.

How a WeWork design takes shape

Many design decisions at WeWork are made based on data the company collects about its users’ evolving needs, Wisecarver said. But as an architect by training, she also draws inspiration from everywhere, from fashion to hospitality. “I’ve always been interested in space and how people move from private to public spaces,” she said. “I’m always thinking about how work isn’t just a place you go and grind. It should also be a space you enjoy, where you can interact.”

Wisecarver began at WeWork as a project manager in Australia before helping launch locations in China, Singapore, Japan and India. In those countries, she studied how cultural habits shape the look and feel of workplaces and how thoughtful design can, in turn, influence how people work. In Japan, for example, the office is often “a place people can’t wait to leave at the end of the day,” she said. To soften that sentiment, WeWork added features like horigotatsu, a kind of sunken seating often seen in Japanese homes and restaurants.

“People would linger, have a drink after work, and spend a little more time. It became a retreat from the traditional idea of work,” Wisecarver said. “Social spaces are becoming all-encompassing, and work is part of that.”

More recently, WeWork has become a hub for A.I. startups. A.I. companies occupy a significant share of WeWork spaces globally today. Wisecarver has noticed some distinct preferences of A.I. founders. “It’s interesting how much their aesthetic matters to them. They have a very clear design aesthetic: They want the space to feel cozy and comfortable,” she observed. “And in the meeting rooms and smaller spaces—like private offices, phone booths or phone rooms—you can really see that attention to detail. They really want to have that sense of brand, which is great.”

As A.I. reduces the time spent on administrative tasks and human interaction and creativity become central to workplaces, Santora predicted that, in 10 years, offices will become more “intentional.” “It will serve as the center of collaboration, innovation and culture, not a place for routine tasks that can be done anywhere,” he said. “The shift is already underway. Over the next decade, the companies that win will be the ones that design their workspaces and their ways of working, around it.”

Restaurants are a notoriously tough and thankless business. Even the good ones can be financially fragile. That’s why it’s almost unheard of for venture capitalists to back them. But inKind, a platform that writes checks ranging from $100,000 to $10 million to thousands of restaurants, comes close. Its founder and CEO, Johann Moonesinghe, believes he has found a formula that lets everyone win: investors, restaurant owners and customers alike.

inKind operates an app that functions like a ClassPass for restaurants and bars. It sells dining credits that can be used at thousands of restaurants on the platform—plus a 20 percent reward that can be redeemed on a future visit. The appeal for diners is obvious.

Behind the scenes, however, the model is more unusual. inKind raises money from investors and uses those funds to finance individual restaurants. Instead of collecting interest or betting on a massive exit years down the road, inKind takes a share of a restaurant’s future revenue in the form of dining credits—often heavily discounted—which it then sells for a profit.

For example, inKind might give a restaurant $1 million in cash in exchange for $2 million in dining credits, then sell those credits for $1.5 million to app users. For inKind, the biggest risk is how long a restaurant stays in business. If it buys two years’ worth of credits but the restaurant closes after six months, inKind theoretically loses money. That risk is partly mitigated by having thousands of restaurants on the platform, but if closures were to happen at scale, the damage could be serious.

“In the first year, I lost 50 percent of the money that I funded to restaurants because I didn’t know how much credit to buy,” Moonesinghe told Observer. “I bought $100,000 in donut credits from some donut place in Michigan. It was impossible to sell it. So it took us years and years to get better at underwriting and building the consumer base to sell the credit.”

For restaurants, the math is more complicated. Moonesinghe argues that because the cost of food is typically only 20 to 30 percent of the menu price, restaurants can still make a profit by selling credits to inKind at half the menu price. Of course, food isn’t a restaurant’s only expense. The real question is whether a restaurant can cover its remaining costs through smart management or enough revenue from non-inKind customers.

“We really wanted to create a business model where every stakeholder wins,” said Moonesinghe, who owns four restaurants between Austin, Scottsdale and Las Vegas. “If I had opened my restaurants in the traditional way, I wouldn’t be making any money on those restaurants today. All of that money would be going back to pay my investor.”

To date, inKind has provided more than $600 million in funding to over 6,000 restaurants across the U.S. The company recently raised another $450 million from investors and is aiming to add more than 10,000 restaurants to the platform this year.

The latest funding round was led by Magnetar Capital. Participants included notable names such as Jay-Z’s investment firm MarcyPen Capital Partners, former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, all four members of the band Metallica and more than a dozen restaurant owners.

The overwhelming investor interest marks a sharp reversal from inKind’s early years, when Moonesinghe largely funded the company with his own money and struggled to attract outside capital. He launched inKind in 2016 in Austin with his husband Andrew Harris, his late brother Rajan Moonesinghe and product designer Marcus Triest. Moonesinghe said the company’s early days were so capital-intensive that he and his husband cashed out their home and retirement accounts to keep it alive.

“Venture investors hated our business because we’re so balance sheet heavy, we require so much money to give the restaurants,” he said. “And the debt partners didn’t want to lend us, because they’re like, restaurants are the most risky.”

Now, Moonesinghe says fundraising is entirely relationship-driven, and he’s highly selective about whose money he takes. MarcyPen—the investment vehicle formed from a merger between Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners and the investment arm of Pendulum Holdings, founded by former Barack Obama adviser Robbie Robinson—was the first institutional investor inKind brought on.

“These guys really understand us. They understand the brand we’re trying to build. They’re great investors and super well-connected. They love wine, I love wine. So we ended up creating a relationship,” Moonesinghe said.

Because of this relationship-based fundraising approach, inKind’s founders still own more than 75 percent of the company. “This allows us to take a really, really long-term approach. That’s our biggest asset,” Moonesinghe said. “We don’t need an exit. We don’t need to quickly get out of deals. For us, if we can help the restaurants do well and make money for their owners, even if a deal is taking us longer to sell their credit, that’s okay.”

PayPal’s board chairman Enrique Lores surprised Wall Street yesterday (Feb. 3) by appointing himself as the payment giant’s new CEO, replacing Alex Chriss. Lores, who was CEO of HP right up until the announcement, will officially assume his new role on March 1. HP’s board, largely blindsided by Lores’ move to PayPal, scrambled to appoint company director Bruce Broussard as interim CEO and begin a search for Lores’ more permanent successor.

A board chairman taking over the CEO job himself usually signals a lack of suitable candidates. PayPal’s board had considered a handful of internal and external options to replace Chriss, but ultimately didn’t find the right person, per Semafor’s reporting. Today’s digital payments industry is dominated by founder-CEO types like Block’s Jack Dorsey, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Affirm’s Max Levchin—who is also a co-founder of PayPal.

That means Lores, who has little experience in digital payments and fintech, is entering a field packed with more seasoned rivals and has a lot to prove. In yesterday’s announcement, PayPal candidly said the decision to replace Chriss was because “the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations.” Lores promises a faster turnaround and more aggressive innovation, without sacrificing the stability expected of a public company.

“We will further strengthen the culture of innovation necessary to deliver long-term transformation and balance this with near-term delivery, executing with greater speed and precision, and holding ourselves accountable for consistent delivery quarter on quarter, to further assert PayPal’s industry leadership position,” he said in a statement.

Investors are clearly skeptical. PayPal shares have plunged 20 percent since the leadership announcement. “I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company,” David Marcus, who served as PayPal’s CEO from 2012 to 2014, said in an X post in reaction to the news.

Lores’ playbook in a changed market

The market PayPal operates in today is far more complicated than the one it conquered a decade ago. Digital payments have evolved beyond a simple pay button on a checkout page. That segment, which PayPal calls “branded checkout,” is now dominated by Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

In the enterprise sector, PayPal faces stiff competition from Stripe and Block’s Square. In peer-to-peer payments, it’s under pressure from Zelle and Block’s Cash App, though one bright spot there is its ownership of Venmo, which it acquired in 2013.

On top of that, newer payment trends like “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) add another layer of complexity. PayPal launched its own BNPL product, “Pay in 4,” in 2020 amid the pandemic-driven consumer boom. But it has yet to prove itself as a serious player in a post-COVID world and a meaningful rival to Klarna and Affirm.

Lores’ playbook includes fixing PayPal’s “branded checkout” business and pivoting the company into the A.I. era through an initiative called “AgenTek Commerce.” Specifically, Lores plans to push Face ID and fingerprint authentication to nearly half of PayPal’s active users by the end of this year, interim CEO Jamie Miller said during yesterday’s earnings call. That’s a direct attempt to match the one-touch speed of Apple Pay. Miller also said PayPal is building a “universally trusted catalog” that A.I. agents can browse and purchase from on behalf of consumers.

As Lores steps into the CEO role, PayPal’s new board chairman is David Dorman, the former CEO of AT&T. The company’s nine-person board includes a mix of technology, finance and consumer leaders, including Microsoft executive Joy Chik, former EY CEO Carmine Di Sibio, former Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff and Estée Lauder Companies general counsel Deirdre Stanley, among others.

Dorman praised Lores’ reputation for “customer-centric innovation” in a statement yesterday. “His strong track record leading complex transformations and disciplined execution on a global basis will ensure PayPal maintains its leadership of the dynamic payments industry now and into the future.”

Tesla is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow (Jan. 28). But the electric carmaker’s shareholders are less interested in quarterly margins than in hearing Elon Musk talk about everything else. On Say.com, a third-party platform Tesla uses to collect questions for its earnings calls, the most up-voted submissions from both retail and institutional investors aren’t about vehicle sales; they’re about robotaxis, humanoid robots and SpaceX.

Here are the top investor questions, and why they matter.

“You once said: Loyalty deserves loyalty. Will long-term Tesla shareholders still be prioritized if SpaceX does an IPO?”

Musk runs six companies, but Tesla is the only one that’s publicly traded. As a result, its earnings calls have become the one venue where investors and Wall Street analysts can directly ask Musk about his other privately-held ventures. SpaceX has been top of mind for many Musk observers because of its highly anticipated blockbuster IPO. The rocket and satellite company is reportedly taking steps to go public as soon as this year, targeting a valuation of $1.5 trillion—nearly double its current valuation of $800 billion.

That would instantly make SpaceX Musk’s most valuable company. Tesla, for now, remains the largest Musk-led firm with a $1.36 trillion market cap, but its momentum is fading as EV sales slow and new products struggle to scale. Meanwhile, SpaceX is thriving out of the spotlight, pulling in 11-figure annual revenue from government contracts and consumer Starlink subscriptions. Musk’s stake there now represents more than half of his net worth.

If SpaceX goes public, Musk would suddenly have a second set of public shareholders to answer to—along with earnings calls, regulatory scrutiny and even more media obligations. Tesla investors already bristled last year when Musk took on another high-profile time sink as head of DOGE, a political side project that distracted from the carmaker.

“When is FSD going to be 100% unsupervised?” and “What is the current bottleneck to increased Robotaxi deployment & personal use of unsupervised FSD? The safety/performance of the most recent models or people to monitor robotaxis in-car or remotely? Or something else?”

When it comes to Tesla itself, investors are eager for updates on FSD and Robotaxi. FSD, short for “Full Self-Driving,” is Tesla’s driver-assistance software, though the name is misleading: it still requires a human driver to remain alert and ready to intervene at all times. Musk has been promising true autonomy for more than a decade, but it’s not quite there yet. Regulators classify FSD as Level 2 autonomy, meaning the human is still in charge. Fully unsupervised driving would be Level 5.

So far, the biggest step Tesla has taken toward that vision is Robotaxi, its autonomous ride-hailing service now operating in Austin. The company launched it in June 2025, using modified Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD. Initially, human safety monitors sat in the passenger seat. As of January, a small number of vehicles without supervisors have joined the fleet, marking a major milestone. Expansion to more cities hinges on regulatory approval.

With global EV demand leveling off,  the success or failure of Robotaxi plays a large role in Tesla’s future.

“Regarding Optimus, could you share the current number of units deployed in Tesla factories and actively performing production tasks? What specific roles or operations are they handling, and how has their integration impacted factory efficiency or output?”

Another key product that will determine Tesla’s fate is Optimus, a humanoid robot designed to take over tasks that are boring or unsafe—from household chores to factory work. Naturally, Tesla’s EV factories would be a perfect proving ground for these robots. The company plans to begin training Optimus at its Austin Gigafactory in early 2026, teaching robots to perform human factory tasks.

Tesla announced the Optimus project in 2021 and unveiled a prototype in 2022. It’s powered by Tesla’s in-house machine learning and A.I. technology. Musk has described the project as one of Tesla’s most important long-term endeavors, even saying it could eventually be more significant than the company’s vehicle business.

According to Musk, initial production of Optimus is expected later this year, but at an “agonizingly slow” pace due to the complexity of humanoid robotics. Musk has targeted selling Optimus to the public as soon as next year. But given Musk’s track record of sticking to ambitious timelines, investors may want to take that with a grain of salt.

In 2020, Alex Mashrabov joined Snapchat as director of generative A.I. after the messaging app’s parent company, Snap, acquired his startup. Mashrabov was the brain behind Snapchat’s popular face filters, a signature feature that helped Snap stay competitive during the COVID years, when TikTok was spending billions annually to cement its foothold in the U.S. The success of those filters earned Mashrabov the industry nickname “the godfather of consumer generative A.I.”

In late 2023, Mashrabov left Snap to launch his own venture, Higgsfield, which builds a suite of A.I. tools designed to dramatically shorten video production and editing time. The product taps into an ever-growing demand for video content among marketers and influencers, where relevance increasingly depends less on polish than on frequency. The app has gained traction quickly, attracting celebrity users including Madonna, Snoop Dogg and Will Smith—entirely organically, according to the company.

“Social media is the largest media in the world and the most important media in the world, but the rules of the game are very fierce,” Mashrabov told Observer. “If someone wants to get popular on social media, they need to post several videos a day. Traditional production methods don’t get you there, but generative A.I. gets you there by shortening the production cycle from weeks to basically hours.”

That pitch has resonated with investors. Higgsfield recently raised $130 million in a Series A round at a valuation of $1.3 billion, making it one of the highest-valued A.I. video startups to date. Investors in the round include Accel, Menlo Ventures and AI Capital Partners, the U.S.-based fund affiliated with Alpha Intelligence Capital.

The company is also scaling rapidly on the revenue side. Higgsfield says it has reached an annual recurring revenue run rate (ARR) of roughly $200 million, up from about $100 million just two months earlier. While such figures are self-reported and difficult to compare directly across companies and eras, Higgsfield has described its recent growth as outpacing the early ARR trajectories of companies such as OpenAI, Slack and Zoom.

Under the hood, Higgsfield combines diffusion-based A.I. video generation models with large language models trained to understand camera motion, scene composition and visual continuity. Users can describe a scene, choose a camera movement and set a mood, and the system generates short clips—typically three to ten seconds long—optimized for platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

The interface is designed to feel more like a virtual studio than a traditional editing suite. Users start in a video workspace and then select from specialized modules depending on the task. The “Cinema Studio” tool, for example, focuses on directed camera movement, offering preset motions like dolly-ins, aerial pullbacks, pans and push-ins that mirror classical cinematography. Other tools include “LipSync” for dialogue-driven clips and “Click to Ad,” which turns static product images into short promotional videos.

Higgsfield is emerging amid a fast-evolving A.I. video market that has accelerated since 2023, driven by demand for short-form content and breakthroughs in underlying models. Advances in diffusion techniques, transformer-based video understanding and large-scale multimodal training have pushed A.I. video generation from experimental demos toward practical, production-ready tools.

Transformers, a type of neural network architecture introduced by Google in 2017, are central to that shift. Unlike earlier models that processed data step by step, transformers learn context by modeling relationships across an entire sequence at once, whether words in a sentence or frames in a video.

“Transformer models going mainstream is a major technology shift,” Mashrabov said. “Those transformer models can fully model the world. It’s exciting to see that we went from generating very small, 64-by-64 images to producing consistent, minutes-long videos at 4K resolution.”

Large players are now racing into the same space. OpenAI, for example, has unveiled Sora, a text-to-video model capable of generating longer, more coherent clips from written prompts. Higgsfield, however, is betting on a different workflow it calls “click-to-video,” where users can create clips with minimal input, such as a single image, rather than lengthy prompts.

“It’s very difficult for a regular social media marketer to write 100-word prompts,” he said. “It gets complex because you need to include all the details you want, plus negative prompts for what you don’t want. For brand advertisers especially, it’s important to avoid controversy, which means even longer, more careful prompting. Click-to-video removes a lot of that friction.”

Among all the white-collar jobs threatened by A.I., management consulting—a purely idea-based occupation that relies heavily on analytical and problem-solving skills—sits near the front of displacement fears. As reasoning LLMs and A.I. agents take on many junior-level tasks faster and more accurately, major firms like McKinsey, Accenture and the “Big Four” are cutting jobs and rethinking how they hire.

That doesn’t necessarily mean consulting is disappearing. For college graduates and young professionals who still aspire to the field, it simply means a different set of skills and qualities will be required to succeed. On Tuesday (Jan. 6), Bob Sternfels, McKinsey & Company’s board chair and global managing partner—the firm’s top role—shared those criteria during a talk at CES 2026.

Sternfels highlighted three skills that will continue to matter in an A.I.-infused world:

• Aspire. Setting the right goals and inspiring others to believe in them—essentially leadership and direction-setting.
• Judgment. The ability to distinguish right from wrong and to prioritize effectively. “A.I. models don’t know right or wrong. Humans need to set the right parameters, whether based on a company’s values or societal norms,” Sternfels said.
• Creativity. A recurring theme among leaders across industries. A.I. is still built on “inference models,” Sternfels said, and the ability to generate new ideas from nothing remains a fundamentally human skill that machines won’t replace anytime soon.

For decades, the consulting world was heavily defined by pedigree. But in the A.I. era, “where you went to school matters a lot less,” Sternfels said. In tech, he noted, hiring increasingly focuses on signals of capability rather than credentials—“not what university you graduated from, but what your GitHub profile looks like. That means a wider set of people can enter the workforce with different pathways.”

Sternfels was joined onstage by Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture capital firm General Catalyst, and angel investor Jason Calacanis for a live taping of the popular All-In podcast. On creativity, Taneja added, “Learning how to ask the right questions and solving hard problems are very different mindsets. It’s about curiosity and kind of back to being kids.”

McKinsey recently made headlines for cutting hundreds of back-office jobs as A.I. automates parts of its operations. Putting a specific number on the impact for the first time, Sternfels said the firm is reducing non-client-facing headcount by 25 percent while seeing a 10 percent productivity gain from A.I.

A more telling number, though, is that the firm is also increasing its client-facing staff by 25 percent, Sternfels said, which amounts to an “unprecedented number of new hires, because the work is changing.”

McKinsey employs about 43,000 people globally, according to its website, with headcount roughly evenly split between client-facing and back-office roles. That balance is apparently shifting as the firm staffs its business differently.

The learning gap

However, one question that the consulting industry has yet to find a satisfactory answer to is how to train and develop talent in the A.I. era. And elite universities don’t seem to be preparing students for it, either.

Entry-level consultants have traditionally spent significant time reading documents and performing repetitive work. Such grunt work was not only part of the workflow but also the primary way junior employees learned and progressed. As those tasks become easier to automate, new hires risk losing opportunities to build skills, judgment and character.

“There’s a massive gap in resilience,” Sternfels said. “You’re gonna get knocked out. The question is: do you get back up? And how do you get back up? I think the educational system today doesn’t necessarily build individual capability in resilience.”

Since the abrupt halt brought on by Covid-19, most Chinese companies that once dominated CES have retreated amid extended travel restrictions and rising geopolitical tensions. But Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker, stands out as a notable exception, charging ahead in the U.S. market even as the presence of many of its Chinese peers has faded. This year, Lenovo claimed center stage at CES 2026, hosting its annual product launch event, Tech World, at Las Vegas’s coolest venue: the Sphere.

The two-hour event yesterday (Jan. 6) held the audience’s attention throughout. Lasers cut through the darkness as 16K video washed across the Sphere’s vast, curved screen, wrapping the audience in light and sound. The spectacle doubled as a demonstration of Lenovo’s partnership with Sphere Studios, which produces content for the venue. Behind the scenes, hundreds of Lenovo workstations, servers and services powered the ultra-high-resolution visuals, enabling real-time rendering for immersive live shows and cinematic-scale production.”

Unlike many of its peers, Lenovo loves co-marketing with other major tech brands, often inviting their senior executives to share the stage. Yesterday, Lenovo chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang was joined by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Huang and Su had delivered their own CES keynotes earlier in the week.

Throughout the presentation, Lenovo unveiled a broad slate of products and platforms. The announcements centered on what Lenovo calls Hybrid A.I., led by Qira, a cross-device personal A.I. “super agent,” alongside a full stack of A.I. platforms and services designed for both consumers and enterprises.

On the hardware side, the company introduced new A.I. PCs across its Yoga, IdeaPad, ThinkPad and ThinkCentre Aura Edition lines, along with new Motorola flagship smartphones, including a FIFA World Cup 2026 special-edition Razr. Lenovo also showcased several rollable and wearable concept devices, as well as new ThinkSystem and ThinkEdge servers and an A.I. Cloud Gigafactory developed with Nvidia for large-scale A.I. infrastructure deployments.

Lenovo’s brand push in the U.S.

In recent years, Tech World has evolved into one of the industry’s more closely watched conferences, distinct from traditional product launches in both scope and ambition. Lenovo has used the event not only to introduce new devices but to frame its view of where its industry is headed.

Beyond technology, Lenovo has increasingly aligned itself with high-profile sports brands to strengthen its foothold in the U.S. market. It is an official partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026 in North America and a major sponsor of Formula 1. During yesterday’s event, Lenovo hosted a ticket raffle offering attendees a chance to win an all-inclusive ticket to FIFA World Cup quarterfinal matches (whose prices are at a historical high). FIFA President Gianni Infantino also appeared onstage during the presentation.

Lenovo sells personal computers, servers, monitors and smartphones, and Yang has long framed the U.S. as an important market. “We want to be a solid no.3 in North America,” he told Reuters in a 2021 interview. Today, Lenovo trails HP and Dell in the U.S. PC market. American consumers account for less than 20 percent of Lenovo’s total revenue, Yang told Reuters in August.

In the years leading up to 2020, Chinese companies were a dominant force at CES, often accounting for a third or more of all exhibitors. At CES 2018, more than 1,500 Chinese firms attended the show. By 2023, the first year after China fully reopened, that number had fallen to fewer than 500. While participation has rebounded since then, it remains below pre-Covid levels, and several major Chinese technology companies, including Huawei, DJI and Alibaba, were notably absent in recent years.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the biggest celebrity in Las Vegas this week. His CES keynote at the Fontainebleau Resort proved harder to get into than any sold-out Vegas shows. Journalists who cleared their schedules for the event waited for hours outside the 3,600-seat BleauLive Theatre. Many who arrived on time—after navigating the sprawling maze of conference venues and, in some cases, flying in from overseas to see the tech king of the moment—were turned away due to overcapacity and redirected to a watch party outside, where some 2,000 attendees gathered in a mix of frustration and reverence.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Huang jogged onto the stage, wearing a glistening, embossed black leather jacket, and wished the crowd a happy New Year. He opened with a brisk history of A.I., tracing the last few years of exponential progress—from the rise of large language models to OpenAI’s advances in reasoning systems and the explosion of so-called agentic A.I. All of it built toward the theme that dominated the bulk of his 90-minute presentation: physical A.I.

Physical A.I. is a concept that has gained momentum among leading researchers over the past year. The goal is to train A.I. systems to understand the intuitive rules humans take for granted—such as gravity, causality, motion and object permanence—so machines can reason about and safely interact with real environments.

Nvidia enters the self-driving race

Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a world foundational model designed to power autonomous driving. He called it “the world’s first reasoning autonomous driving A.I.”

To demonstrate, Nvidia played a one-shot video of a Mercedes vehicle equipped with Alpamayo navigating busy downtown San Francisco traffic. The car executed turns, stopped for lights and vehicles, yielded to pedestrians and changed lanes. A human driver sat behind the wheel throughout the drive but did not intervene.

One particularly interesting thing Huang discussed was how Nvidia trains physical A.I. systems—a fundamentally different challenge from training language models. Large language models learn from text, of which humanity has produced enormous quantities. But how do you teach an A.I. Newton’s second law of motion?

“Where does that data come from?” Huang asked. “Instead of languages—because we created a bunch of text that we consider ground truths that A.I. can learn from—how do we teach an A.I. the ground truths of physics? There are lots and lots of videos, but it’s hardly enough to capture the diversity of interactions we need.”

Nvidia’s answer is synthetic data: information generated by A.I. systems based on samples of real-world data. In the case of Alpamayo, another Nvidia world model—called Cosmos—uses limited real-world inputs to generate far more complex, physically plausible videos. A basic traffic scenario becomes a series of realistic camera views of cars interacting on crowded streets. A still image of a robot and vegetables turns into a dynamic kitchen scene. Even a text prompt can be transformed into a video with physically accurate motion.

Nvidia said the first fleet of Alpamayo-powered robotaxis, built in the 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA vehicles, is slated to launch in the U.S. in the first quarter, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia later in 2026.

For now, Alpamayo remains a Level 2 autonomous driving system—similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—which requires a human driver to remain attentive behind the wheel at all times. Nvidia’s longer-term goal is Level 4 autonomy, where vehicles can operate without human supervision in specific, constrained environments. That’s one step below full autonomy, or Level 5.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical A.I. is nearly here,” Huang said in a voiceover accompanying one of the videos shown during the keynote.

LEGO just made its most ambitious showing ever at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show—an unusual venue for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less device called the “SMART Brick,” a bid to bring a myriad of senses to its silent, incredibly precise plastic bricks.

The SMART Brick is a standard two-by-four LEGO brick (1.6 cm by 3.2 cm) with a tiny, custom ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip allows the brick to recognize distance, color and motion, and even to interpret the “personalities” of thousands of LEGO minifigures.

The brick sits at the center of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make physical play more interactive and fun. It’s meant to be a system “where technology seamlessly brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,” according to LEGO. The Danish company is billing SMART Play as its most significant product innovation in 50 years, since the introduction of the minifigure in the late 1970s.

The SMART Brick, small enough to be integrated in any LEGO model, packs in far more than its size suggests. It includes responsive lights, a color-recognition scanner to sense its surroundings, a sound synthesizer capable of producing a wide range of effects, and a built-in accelerometer that tracks how the brick moves through the air in real-time.

The SMART brick works in conjunction with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2×2 studless tile embedded with a unique digital ID that tells a nearby SMART Brick what role it should assume in a given context. SMART minifigures, without a visible tag, also contain their own unique digital IDs that encode a character’s “personality” and guide how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.

During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, placed a SMART Brick on a panel divided into four colors: red, green, blue and yellow. As the brick moved across the surface, it lit up to match the color beneath it.

“When you put that in a LEGO model, the model knows the world around it,” Donaldson said. “It knows it’s in a water bayou; it knows it’s in a jungle bayou because it’s green; maybe it knows it’s in a red fire engine over a blue police car.”

In another demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it through different positions—splashing, sleeping, even flying to test whether the duck approved. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed different emotions: contentment, snoring, irritation and more.

The SMART Brick can also sense proximity. When another brick moves closer or farther away, it reacts by changing its lights or emitting sounds. When placed on or near a SMART Tag, it instantly assumes whatever role the tag assigns it—a police car, a duck, a helicopter and so on.

SMART minifigures, meanwhile, react uniquely to their environments through distinct sounds, moods and behaviors. Those reactions are played through the speaker inside a nearby SMART Brick; the minifigures themselves don’t produce sound, but instead trigger the brick to do so on their behalf.

LEGO SMART Play is set to officially launch on March 1. Preorders for an all-in-one LEGO Star Wars SMART Play set begin on Jan. 9.